Financing long term liabilities (Germany)

In Germany the basis for the management of radioactive residues is the polluter-pays principle. All steps of treatment of radioactive waste arising from operation, decommissioning and dismantling including conditioning, interim storage and disposal of radioactive waste have to be financed by the waste producers. The waste producers are responsible for the harmless recycling of the residues or for their orderly management as radioactive waste. The Federal Government is responsible for establishing disposal facilities. Accordingly the waste producers are constructing and operating facilities in which the radioactive residues can be treated and stored until their disposal. As far as the radioactive waste cannot be stored by the producer, waste originating from research, medicine and industry can be stored in surface storage facilities of the federal states. Spent fuel from German NPPs is partly reprocessed in France and UK. The rest has to be disposed off directly in deep geologic formations. Until a repository for spent fuel is available in Germany spent fuel will be stored in interim storage facilities on the sites of the NPPs. The storage will take place in casks in a dry way. In exceptional cases, if the storage at a NPP site is not possible, there are two central storages at Ahaus and Gorleben which are in operation and can be made available as reserve. Radioactive waste returning from the reprocessing of German spent fuel in France and UK is stored in the Gorleben central storage. The Federal Government is aiming to establish a repository in deep geological formations about the year 2030 which shall be available for all types and quantities of radioactive waste. The necessary expenses for the planning and construction of radioactive waste disposal facilities are initially carried by the Federal Government. The Government recovers the costs by contributions or advance payments from the waste producers. The use of storage and disposal facilities is financed by charges and fees levied from the waste producers. Altogether, financial resources for decommissioning are needed for the following steps: the post-operational phase in which the facility is prepared for dismantling after its final shut-down, dismantling of the radioactive part of the facility, management, storage and disposal of the radioactive waste, restoration of the site, licensing and regulatory supervision of all these steps. Additional means are necessary for the management, storage and disposal of the spent fuel. The way in which the availability of financial resources is secured differs between public owned installations and installations of the private power utilities. In Germany, past practices has resulted in singular contaminated sites of limited extent, mainly during the first half of the 20. century. Those contaminated sites have been or are being cleaned up and redeveloped. In large areas of Saxony and Thuringia, the geological formations permitted the surface and underground mining of Uranium ore. Facilities of the former Soviet-German WISMUT Ltd. where ore was mined and processed from 1946 until the early 1990's can be found at numerous sites. In the course of the re-unification of Germany, the soviet shares of the WISMUT were taken over by the Federal Republic of Germany and the closure of the WISMUT facilities was initiated. In that phase the extent of the damages to the environment and of the necessary remediation work became clear. All mining and milling sites are now closed and are under decommissioning. A comprehensive remediation concept covers all WISMUT sites. Heaps and mill-tailing ponds are transferred into a long-term stable condition. The area of the facilities to be remediated amounts to more than 30 km2. Heaps cover a total area of ca. 15,5 km2, tailing ponds in which the tailings resulting from the Uranium production are stored as sludges cover 6,3 km2). In total, the remediation issues are very complex and without precedent. The implementation of the measures will cover a period of 15 to 20 years depending on the site. The necessary expenses are carried by the Federal Government and estimated to amount to about EUR 6.5 billion. In addition the Federal Republic of Germany inherited 6 operating NPPs of soviet design from the former GDR. Comprehensive safety analyses after the German reunification arrived at the conclusion that they did not correspond to Western German safety standards. They had to be shut down in 1990. As the power industry was not prepared to carry the financial risks of backfitting and re-licensing the reactors, the Federal Republic of Germany took over the liabilities. The aim is to finish the decommissioning activities around the year 2012. The total costs for dismantling the plants and storing the resulting waste are estimated to amount to about EUR 3.1 billion